Imagine, every morning and evening, a loud blast surprises you in your home. It sounds like a bomb went off. Maybe an accident at a construction site? No... it sounds... older. Historic. That was canon fire. The first time I heard the canons, I jumped. High in the air. Suddenly fearing that we were under siege by the English armada. But then I came to my senses. "Jake, it is 2021", I said to myself. If Copenhagen was under siege, the English navy definitely would not be the perpetrators. But after a few short weeks in our apartment, we learned it was just the Danish way to signal the country to raise their flags in the morning and lower them at night. However, the fact that Phoebe and I are not Danish meant that our minds would run wild every morning and evening after the initial shock wore off. Were they shooting off actual canons? Where were they aiming? Out to sea? Towards the city? What happened every morning when those canons were loaded, lit, and fired? This little short is the best visualization of what goes on in my mind every morning as I could make. Enjoy, Kanon.
Now that you have seen this, I can admit that I was always aware that the Danish military is not firing outdated weaponry on their own citizens every dawn and dusk. No confusion here. However, this provided me such a fun creative opportunity to think about all of the crazy things that could happen as canon balls went flying around the city. In addition to brainstorming different insane scenarios, this also provided me a great opportunity to get out and explore our new home. Phoebe and I would take walks around the city as I frantically ran around taking reference pictures and scribbling down half-baked sketches in my notebook. Standing at the finish line of a project, it is alway fascinating to look back and see where it started. How small the initial idea was and how it ballooned throughout the production into something bigger. How a simple joke can lead me to create a short video that took over a month to make. Waking up at 5 in the morning to animate, rig, and light each unique scene. This was an incredibly fun side project for me that allowed me to do what I love most - take a ridiculous idea and bring it to life through both my creative and technical sides. Below, I break down a little bit of that process starting from the idea, through to the storyboarding, modeling, animating, shading, simulating, lighting, and editing. Thank you for your time.
The Initial Idea
This was not a project where I had a completed idea right from the start. I was struggling to gain some solid footing on another personal project of mine, and I knew that I needed a little break. I have a notebook full of half-baked ideas, some just little sketches or single words. For my personal projects, I usually wait until something really grabs me as opposed to just muscling through an idea that seems reluctant to come. So, I was pleasantly surprised when one day, startled by the canons like most mornings, it hit me that this could be my new project. I quickly scratched down seven frames, seen below. A guard seeing the sun, rushing to load the canons, and firing it off - unfortunately taking a bird with it.
I instantly started seeing it come together in my head. Furiously writing down every possible comedic situation I could think of. Does a dog get distracted by the canon ball flying by and take off at a full sprint, taking its owner with him? Does it hit a kayaker's paddle, forcing them to only be able to paddle in circles? Does a squirrel get caught on it as it flies by and goes for a wild ride through the air? Does Denmark even have squirrels? There were so many options, but as I started to draw them out, envisioning how the scenes could come together, I began to get excited about the scenes that would actually work. Below you can see a few of the storyboards from the original animatic.
The Production
Although the idea for a scene might be quite concrete in my head, creating it in the computer is a whole other beast. In order to avoid looking down the blank abyss of a newly created 3D scene, it helps me to draw out the characters and objects before I ever get into the computer. This step in the process saves me hours of time I would normally spend messing around in 3D by helping me to land on the base forms, proportions, and layout before I ever touch a wacom pen.
Once I had the rough outline of this piece, I began to fully realize what I had gotten myself into. I was going to need to do huge amounts of modeling, simulation, and animation. Some of these scenes might take 15 - 20 hours to build but only make up 3 to 4 seconds of the final film. Because I wanted to include a variety of locations, most of the assets I would make in one scene could not be reused in another. It frequently felt as though I was starting over again as I moved from one completed shot to work on the next. Below is a single example of the journey that the shots would go through. From the story board, to the modeling of elements, animation of characters, simulation (of hair, smoke, water, glass, cloth, fire, etc.), lighting, and finally rendering. To keep from this being an incredibly long tutorial, I will refrain from showing the breakdown of each scene.
Selected Stills
Thank you for viewing!
